Equality & Diversity

The CUCU Equality & Diversity working group is the branch’s team tasked with pursuing actions that increase justice and equity for groups marginalised because of their identity (to name just a few: BME, disabled, LGBTQ+, women).

Contact us

equality@ucu.cam.ac.uk

Current campaigns

Anti Racism/ BME

Our anti-racist group shares ideas and builds solidarity across the university. Our aim is to actively, yet at a critical distance, work with and monitor activities of the university-led BME staff group and other initiatives on race. We invite all academic and academic-related staff interested in anti-racist work to get involved.

Disabilities

CUCU, at the prompting of the Cambridge University Student Union Disabled Students’ officer, is working with other unions to develop a community of members of our community who identify as disabled.

With CUSU, we are developing Cambridge-centred activities in observation of the new National Day of Action on disability issues.

Our long-range plan is to collect university and college data about disability inclusion and plans for improvement. With this information, we will better be able to help stakeholders meet their goals and realise when they have fallen short.

We are actively seeking members who identify as disabled and/or feel passionately about justice and equity for disabled people, either to participate in planning activities or to share insights about how to improve Cambridge as a whole.

GPG and family-friendly policies

In May 2018 CUCU started new campaigns on family-friendly policies, and separately on the Gender Pay Gap (GPG) at Cambridge. The latter stands at 20% according to the University’s 2017 Interim Report. We’ve started a dialogue with HR over this, with a first meeting on the GPG in summer 2018, and further meetings on both the GPG and family-friendly policies planned for Michaelmas 2018. One thing which members should note is that the University of Cambridge currently has no internal plans or targets for closing the Gender Pay Gap; we would like to see that changed. Separately, we would like to see the terms of the University’s maternity and shared parental leave policies improved to e.g. match those at Oxford, which currently offers 26 weeks of full paid leave while Cambridge offers 18. Our key concerns regarding the University childcare provision are affordability and availability of places.

Members interested in getting involved with this should contact Paulina Sliwa.

Representatives

Equality OfficerPaulina Sliwa

equality@ucu.cam.ac.uk
Equality OfficerManali Desai

equality@ucu.cam.ac.uk
Equality Officer
Joe Sutliff Sanders

equality@ucu.cam.ac.uk